Written by Mark MacNamara. Originally: "Dialog With Stone," a traveler's digression begun in 2004, with entries From Africa, Europe and North America. Now: a ramble-jam through the countryside of American culture, high and low, real and imagined.

Oct 23, 2011

It's what old people say, "I'm glad I'll be long gone before that happens." Or, "That's something your generation will have to deal with, thank God, not me or mine." This is always in the context of some future shock: global warming, meteorites, or the terrible inequalities that go with population growth, or just now the notion that the United States is committing social and political suicide. This is Pat Buchanan's latest call to despair, a wish-fulfillment based on the notion that America has been caught in the worldwide vortex sucking everything down the drain: a world never more fragmented and a country never more adrift. Nothing holds us together is the thesis: not language, religion, state, or common history; nor a sense of a common destiny, nor the means to achieve the American Dream. Not even capitalism itself. And if you don't believe it, why just look out the window at all those protestors down in the street. Whether Occupiers or Tea Partiers isn't that all symptomatic of 'end times'? Isn't it in the air?Everything is askew and the most forbidding proof of gloom is that in 30 years whites will be a minority in America, And just think of it —130 million Latinos; 66 million blacks — the house will be run by minorities and 'darks' and darkies: the uneducated, gardeners and short-order chefs, check-out counter types, and we won't have that calm, all-clear, now-don't-you-shout-because-daddys-home, assurance that everything will be alright, we won't have Reagan's voice, God love him, to help us remain steady and thoughtful. And hopeful.We'll have to do it ourselves and whatever parts of life aren't already self-service, will be. We'll have to find some new hope, some unknown, unforeseen reason for optimism. We'll be living in like-minded communities, of course, and we'll have to reach out; and one day, sure enough, a meteorite will come and a dirty bomb will go off, and people will remember the good old days, they'll scold themselves that they weren't more careful, and mindful, and they'll come up with drastic new plans, and their kid's kids will get old and they will be ever so glad they won't have to deal with the future as they imagine it. And that's all true. Every bit of it is true. And it all means absolutely nothing, nothing at all, next to a cliche I suppose, but still, there it is, the sunlight coming in the window, just this minute, right now.